The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

149

England have never had the power to alter the syllabus or assessments of external
examinations. Instead they have been able, through their representation on examining
boards and subject committees, to propose new approaches.

An ambitious ‘incremental innovation’ that won considerable support from 6^th forms
in one region was the Associated Examining Board’s ‘Wessex’ project, which
involved linking several subjects into modules around a core syllabus. Bob Rainbow
has chronicled the brief history of this project in his chapter in the 1993 collection on
The Reform of Post-16 Education and Training in England and Wales. (Richardson,
Woolhouse 1993)

His case history of the Wessex Project explains how this collaboration involving five
adjacent Local Education Authorities working with the Associated Examining Board
began in 1987 from a scheme devised by teachers and advisers. The Secondary
Examinations Advisory Council (SEAC) gave it ‘limited pilot status’ until July 1993.
(Rainbow 1993: 87) The structure involved both core skills and a specific vocational
focus to ensure the breadth which had always been missing from single A-Ievels.

The assessment pattern borrowed from the newly-created GCSE the concept of
coursework modules assessed by teachers, with the board’s external assessment
comprising 60% of the final award. Rainbow - writing before the end of the pilot
period - feared that “ ...the very success of this approach [teachers providing students
with feedback during a module] many be the Project ^,s undoing if critics of criterion-
referenced examinations prevail'' (Rainbow 1993: 95). He was also concerned that the
success of students, which led to the bunching of results in the upper grade levels,
would be interpreted as evidence of ‘grade inflation’. He was proved right when in
July 1993 SEAC’s assessors did not authorise the Wessex Project to continue.

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